“I started keeping journals back in 1951 and have a few that are unfinished, but for the past 45 years I haven’t missed a day writing in them. When my grandchildren visit, they run to the bookshelf first thing and pull out the book from the year they were born. They want to read what I wrote about them on that day. “When I was a little girl, Mother was always finding scraps of paper around the house where I’d written things and stuffed them into cracks, sticking out just a little for the curious to find. I’ve always liked to write, and for a while I was a member of a poetry club and published several pieces. I don’t much care for poetry that rhymes though; I prefer free verse. I don’t like being caged in. This one, called Playground After Recess, was written when I worked as a teacher’s aide in a kindergarten. My, how I loved those children, still warm off their mother’s laps. They were so innocent, not worldly at all.”

"My husband and all 3 of our adult children died of a rare, genetic condition that affects the frontal lobe of the brain, robs a person of all their functions, and then kills them within weeks or months. I was with my husband in the nursing home every day when he was ill. He couldn’t talk or move and I couldn’t tell how conscious he was, but I was there with him, and I fed him every day. Our children passed away a few years later, all within 22 months of each other; I held the hands of all three of them as they died. Both Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic are in possession of our family's medical files and are conducting research on the condition. There's a name for what they had, but there's still no cure.

“People used to always ask me, ‘How are you getting through this? How are you dealing with it?’ And I would answer, ‘I’m not dealing with it. God’s dealing with it, and he’s just taking me along.’ That’s the truth. I spent a lot of time in his Word and wore out 3 or 4 Bibles along the way. It’s not been easy, but God has gotten me through.”